Ethan Green, 12, sounds the shofar during a service held by Beth Sholom Temple to celebrate Rosh Hashanah at City Dock in Fredericksburg, Va., on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2014. (AP Photo/The Free Lance-Star, Peter Cihelka)

It is at this time of year that Jews spend time in self-reflection and assessment.

The Jewish New Year or Rosh Hashanah, which began Wednesday, started a 10-day period that culminates with Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

We can generally separate reflection into two categories: reflection on behavior and reflection on attitude. The former focuses on how we act as human beings, how we treat others, our level of productivity and our personal moral and spiritual conduct. Reflection on attitude, conversely, has to do with the beliefs, opinions and views we hold.

Often we spend time reflecting on how we acted over the past year but devote little time to reviewing our attitudes and strongly held views.

But in the confessions of the Yom Kippur liturgy, forgiveness is also sought for sins which we have committed by improper thoughts and by a confused heart. This, in my view, is referring to sins associated with improper beliefs and opinions.

We often take it for granted that the opinions and attitudes we hold are necessarily the correct ones. Asking people to question their deeply held beliefs is especially challenging in a community that demands an unwavering and unquestioning doctrinal belief.

There was a time, however, when Jews were open to examining their beliefs. In the 900s, the great Jewish sage Saadia Gaon wrote a book titled, “The Book of Beliefs and Opinions,” in which he examined Jewish doctrine. In the 1200s, Maimonides wrote his seminal work, “The Guide to the Perplexed,” in which he radically redefined certain Jewish beliefs and theological ideas. Writing in the 1000s, the Jewish ethicist and philosopher Bahya ibn Paquda was explicit about the need to thoroughly and critically reflect upon the fundamentals of faith.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s decision last year to grant a “temporary reprieve” blocking the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Nathan Dunlop has, it seems, satisfied no one.

Death penalty proponents were outraged and the governor’s political adversaries energized. Yet death penalty opponents were equally unhappy as it represented the second time that the Governor had rejected their efforts — the first was when he announced that he would not sign proposed legislation to end the death penalty in Colorado.

The more recent report of an interview comment where the governor acknowledged that he could commute Dunlop’s death sentence if he’s not re-elected has, if anything, only added to confusion and anger.

Yet, let’s admit it. He has managed, as he said was his intention, to put capital punishment on our public agenda. In doing so, he provoked pent-up passions, but also provided occasion for more serious discernment.

I hope to contribute to such discernment by reminding readers of the remarkable shift in Catholic teaching about the death penalty.

Indeed, in the mid-19th century the Vatican (not today’s Vatican City, but the Papal States that then controlled a broad section of Italy) regularly executed criminals, as did virtually all states at that time. And then, of course, there is the terrible earlier history of the Catholic Inquisition’s use of death to punish heretics.

Yet in 1980 a majority of U.S. Catholic bishops voted for an official statement against the death penalty: “In the conditions of contemporary American society, the legitimate purposes of punishment do not justify the imposition of the death penalty.”

And the Bishops’ opposition has since grown ever more unified and vocal — in part, perhaps, because their opposition has been supported both by Pope John Paul II and by the catechism of the Catholic Church.

Strictly speaking, recent Catholic teaching does not absolutely forbid the death penalty, but opposes it in all situations where there are alternatives (such as life without parole) for punishment and for public safety.

John Paul in his 1995 encyclical, “The Gospel of Life,” explicitly noted that in modern societies the situation of having no alternatives is “very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

Their goal, they said, was “not just to proclaim a position, but to persuade Catholics and others to join us in working to end the use of the death penalty. We seek to help build a culture of life in which our nation will no longer try to teach that killing is wrong by killing those who kill.”

Denver’s bishops have, moreover, been consistent in supporting this Catholic campaign. In 1997, commenting on the conviction of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVey, Archbishop Charles Chaput argued that, even assuming a fair judicial process, “Killing the guilty is still wrong. It does not honor the dead. It does not ennoble the living. And while it may satisfy society’s anger for awhile, it cannot even release the murder victim’s loved ones from their sorrow, because only forgiveness can do that.”

He went on to say: “What the death penalty does accomplish is closure through bloodletting, violence against violence — which is not really closure at all, because murder will continue as long as humans sin, and capital punishment can never, by its nature, strike at murder’s root. Only love can do that.”

(FILES) – An file image uploaded on June 14, 2014 on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State (IS) executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province. A major offensive spearheaded by IS but also involving supporters of executed dictator Saddam Hussein has overrun all of one province and chunks of three others since it was launched on June (Getty Images)

Just when we thought that terrorists could not become any more barbaric, last week in Sydney, Australia, locals faithful to ISIS had planned public beheadings of random people off the street.

Having recently returned from a visit to Australia I can attest that it is a wonderful place. Despite the high cost of living, Australia boasts a vibrant democracy, a healthy economy, ample opportunities, a generous welfare system, good weather, beautiful outdoors and people who seem happy and friendly. Yet we have also learned that one of the leaders of ISIS is Australian.

Who are these Australian (and British, U.S.) ISIS members and what do they want? What would inspire Westerners to leave their comfortable homes and join a force that murders innocent people, including citizens of their own countries, in the most barbaric fashion — and then post videos of their dastardly acts on the Internet to brag?

While watching the videos of Westerners dressed in 13th century clothing exhorting their “brothers back home” to join them in jihad, it all suddenly made sense to me. While President Barack Obama and other world leaders have called ISIS a cancer, I believe that ISIS can only truly be understood through the prism of religious fervor.

As a young man in my late teens and early 20s, I, too, experienced the kind of religious passion that made me prepared to sacrifice everything to go out and convince fellow Jews to adopt my way of life.

CARDIFF, WALES – SEPTEMBER 04: Protesters gather near Cardiff Castle during the NATO Summit on September 4, 2014 in Cardiff, Wales. Leaders and senior ministers from across the world are gathering for the two day meeting where Ukraine and the ISIS hostages are likely to be discussed. (Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)

A few days ago, on a picture-perfect Colorado day, I went to a Colorado Rockies baseball game. Conditions couldn’t have been better– 80 degrees, blue sky, no wind, and seats in the shade. It felt almost blissful.

Then something happened that soured the experience for me. Just before the game was to begin, an announcement came over the public-address system. We were going to honor one of our “fallen heroes,” someone who had joined the U.S. military to protect and defend our country, and who had made the “ultimate sacrifice.”

I don’t remember the young man’s name or age, just that he was a young man. Was. He had enlisted, been deployed to Afghanistan, and died all within the space of one year, at least that’s what I gathered from the announcement. Members of his family were present in the stadium, and we were asked to stand and recognized him and his family for his sacrifice. Then we were to sing “God Bless America”.

I couldn’t do it. I was overwhelmed, not by a sense of gratitude and patriotism, but by a sense of grief and shame. To say that this young man had “made the ultimate sacrifice” is one way to say it, but I think it would be much more accurate to say he “was sacrificed”. For what, and by whom?

It is hard for me to understand in what sense it could be said, “He “died for his country.” I imagine that in his own mind and that of his family members that’s what he was doing, but I can’t for the life of me understand just what he was really doing there, or what his death accomplished.

To me, it seems that he was sacrificed by and for those with the wealth, power, and privilege afforded to members of the imperial ruling class who are desperately trying– at any cost– to buttress a decaying and crumbling imperial project.

It is paradoxical ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is using the same terror practices against Christians which the Christians used against Jews and Muslims five centuries earlier. Convert or die or leave, enforced with unimaginable brutality.

Shortly after the advent of Islam in the seventh century, the Moors captured and controlled an area which is now southern Spain.

Muslims, Arabs, Berbers, and Jews more or less peacefully coexisted with each other for six centuries while remaining at odds with the Catholics in neighboring territories.

Under a unified military alliance with the Catholic Church, Spanish and French royalty pushed the Moors out of Iberia, culminating with the fall of Granada in 1492. Prior to Grenada’s demise, a series of discriminatory laws had been enacted by Spanish monarchs discriminating against Jews and Muslims. The Inquisition, or “The Edict of Expulsion,” was put into effect the same year, giving Jews and Muslims the option of converting to Catholicism or leaving Spain.

Many Jews and most Muslims who did not convert went to safe havens in the Ottoman Empire, primarily along the North African coast, but also to Turkey and places now considered the Middle East — places where other Jews had lived in peace for centuries. Although Jews were an underclass in the Ottoman Empire, they were never threatened because of their religion, and many families thrived in what became modern-day Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

FILE – In this Sept. 18, 2013 file photo, Pope Francis waves to faithful as he arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

My roots began deep in Roman Catholicism. My earliest memory is standing next to my mom on a pew, with three fingers in my mouth, during the candlelit, hushed moments of a novena to Mother Mary.

My mom’s name was Dolores, which I learned is a name for Mary, the Mother of Sorrows. After Catholic grade school, I entered on 13 years of seminary prep to become a priest. After ordination I spent more years studying ministry and became a seminary prof for 17 years, including six in Denver at the late St. Thomas Seminary. After leaving the priesthood (another story, another column), I worked in nonprofits for 20 years, and spiritually I’m now an Irish Catholic Episcopalian, with Jewish and Quaker tendencies. There’s about eight of us.

This history is to say that I have read lots of papal and church documents in my day, but I have never read anything quite like “The Joy of the Gospel” by Pope Francis. None like this.

He calls it an exhortation instead of an encyclical; it’s more personal and pastoral than doctrinal and doctrinaire. The 288 paragraphs still have enough pious gobbledegook to pass muster with the cardinals-in-waiting, but this message is meant to engage new minds and attract new hearts. He often writes in the first person, an inviting “I” instead of the distancing, literal Papal “We.” And what he says is thrilling.

A blunt, refreshing beginning: “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience.”

Those following Jesus need to evangelize in the face of this with a certain fierce joy: “an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!”

We are to go into our world not in a great rush, but to slow down and listen to others. This is not a church of my childhood, “An Army of youth ‘neath the standard of Truth, fighting for Christ our Lord” as a popular hymn went. We are more humble, while no less steely.

“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the center and which then ends being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures.” Notice the “I;” elsewhere he talks about when he was in Argentina, very personally. He remains one of us, while asked to lead.

I am a Lutheran minister, and I teach on the subject of religion and the environment for a Lutheran college. I am also a member of the board of Colorado Interfaith Power and Light.

Colorado is one of 40 IPL state affiliates working with communities of faith to lessen the impacts of climate change through education, through taking action to reduce their own carbon footprints and through advocacy for more environmentally responsible policies at every level of government.

We do this out of our conviction that we human beings have a divine calling and responsibility as caretakers of the creation — the beautiful, intricate, interdependent web of life and natural resources upon which all life, including our own, depends. It is a sacred calling to care for a sacred gift.

All major religious traditions share this belief in our calling to be stewards of creation, to see ourselves not as the masters and commanders of the earth, but as part of a community of creatures who live an interdependent existence.

We are not outside or above the natural order, we are part of it, and everything we do affects that natural order.

We cannot pretend that our activity on the earth has no impacts and no consequences. Our scriptures attest that the well-being of the creation is dependent on treating it and each other with reverence and respect. In turn, our own well-being as a human community is dependent on the well-being of the ecosphere.

As people of faith, we believe that God speaks to us through the creation, and that scientific inquiry is one of the tools available to us in order to discern what creation is saying.

Concerns about climate change and intensive scientific research into its causes and potential impacts have been ongoing for several decades, and we are now experiencing many of the impacts that scientists began alerting us to back then. Our climate is changing rapidly. We know that a major driver of that change is the emission of carbon dioxide, and we know that the largest single source of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions is electrical power plants, mostly powered by coal.

A protester raises a placard reading ‘What if it was your children?’ during a demonstration against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, in Stockholm, Sweden, on Thursday, July 31, 2014. With or without a cease-fire, Israel’s prime minister says his country’s military will destroy the Hamas tunnel network in the Gaza Strip. The vow came as Israel called up another 16,000 reservists to pursue the ground campaign in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu says he won’t agree to any cease-fire proposal that doesn’t let Israel complete the mission of destroying the tunnels. (AP Photo/TT/Fredrik Persson) SWEDEN OUT

My title is borrowed directly from a still-important book by philosopher George Grant who, already in 1965, lamented the disappearance of his beloved Canada into the American empire.

I use the title today, as the war on Gaza rages, to refer especially to Israel, but also to the whole of Palestine which it dominates.

By Palestine I mean the land from the Jordan to the sea, as it was before Zionism dreamed its vision and began its colonization. I mean the entire land which Israel now controls, through occupation and settlement in the West Bank and by the ghetto-ization of Gaza.

In a previous essay for Hark (“Palestine: Four steps Americans can take toward a just peace,” I began by recommending “Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland,” by Pamela J. Olson. Let me begin here by noting another important book: “My Promised Land” (2013) by Israeli journalist Ari Shavit. For it, too, is a lament, subtitled, “The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.”

Shavit’s book is compelling because it enables the reader to enter the heart as well as the head of the many Israelis who wish nothing more than peace, but must face forces leading to war without end. He helped me to better understand the complex humanity of my Jewish sisters and brothers in Israel — just as Olson’s book had helped me to similar compassion for Palestinians.

I will not here be reviewing the book, though I highly recommend it. Rather I will use what I learned from it, along with the devastating news coming again from Gaza, to shape my lament. For Shavit gives voice both to Israeli pride and to a pervasive sense of foreboding.

Why lament? Because one must be offended by all the deliberate lies.

It was Aeschylus who told us that truth is war’s first casualty. And we get little truth from Israel’s current leaders, perhaps especially Mr. Netanyahu. Too little truth from Obama and other politicians with their carefully couched support for Israel and not-so-subtle blame for Hamas. And from the “experts” (often paid propagandists) we read and see in our media. Just as we would undoubtedly be offended by lies from Hamas leaders should we be able to hear the details of their claims in clear English.

Shavit, I believe, tells no deliberate lies and tries mightily to face difficult truth. I often found his proud nationalism exaggerated. Yet it helped me understand the fierce and sacral loyalty of Israelis – even very secular people like Shavit himself.

It also helped me to imagine and feel the same fierce and sacral loyalty among Palestinians. So I admire his careful effort to tell the story of his promised land in its now messy and frightened entirety.

I also lament many pious pleas for peace – even from great spirits such as Pope Francis. Though the best plea I’ve heard came from Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as he stood beside Mr. Netanyahu: “My message to Israelis and Palestinians is the same: Stop fighting, start talking and take on the root causes of the conflict so we are not back to the same situation in another six months or a year.”

Why do I lament such pleas? Isn’t that just a self-indulgent way of avoiding real suffering and terrible dying? In part, perhaps. Yet what I recoil most from is their “diplomatic” refusal to speak frankly, to name the full and very hard truth.

A protester gestures and shouts slogans during a demonstration against Israel’s bombing of Gaza on Istiklal avenue in Istanbul, Turkey, on July 17, 2014. Israeli air strikes in Gaza killed four children on July 17, medics said, after a humanitarian lull in a 10-day conflict that has killed 237 Palestinians. AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSEOZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images

Make no mistake about it Israel is in the midst of a war for its very survival. Hamas has invested in acquiring more advanced rockets to fire indiscriminately as Israeli civilians and to create a network of tunnels through which they seek to sneak into Israel to kill and capture thousands of innocent Jews.

Throughout this latest round of the conflict well-meaning people have called for Israel to end its fight against Hamas. Most in the West don’t realize that Hamas is a fanatical religious organization whose raison d’etre is to have armed conflict with Israel leading to the destruction of the state of Israel. In fact the very idea of a ceasefire with Hamas is nonsensical because Hamas has only one goal, to destroy Israel. They see this as a religious obligation from God.

Some thought that once Hamas controlled its own territory it would be forced to start acting responsibly and would accept Israel. This has now definitively been proven wrong. Hamas has run Gaza for seven years. Instead of improving the lives of their population, they have spent huge sums on rockets and underground tunnels meant to kills Jews.

With a fanatical religious organization that believes God forbids compromise and that they are divinely mandated to destroy Israel, there is but one choice. Israel needs to completely destroy their capability to act out their evil mission. For Israel, it is truly do or die.

Thirty five hundred years ago as our ancestors, the ancient Israelites, prepared to enter into the Land of Israel, Moses warns: “If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those of whom you leave will become pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides and they will harass you on the land upon which you dwell,” (Numbers, 33:55).

Relatives of Palestinian Tamer Sammour, 22, mourns during his funeral in the West Bank village of Deir al-Gsoun near Tulkarem town on Friday, Aug. 1, 2014. Sammour was shot and killed during clashes with Israeli troops near Tulkarem, following a protest against the war in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian security sources said. (AP Photo/Mohammed Ballas)

The generation of Israelites who lived through and looked back on the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem itself in 587 B.C. drew very close to despair.

Superpower Babylon dictated all terms. There was no respect for “local traditions.” And a portion of the populace even submitted to slavery in Babylon. No wonder so many sat by the waters of Babylon, weeping and longing for better times.

Does our God no longer honor the chosen-ness of Jerusalem, its king, temple, city? Israel feels loss rather than the well-being promised, vulnerable rather than the political sense of guarantee, and abandonment rather than a sense of being exceptional.

The folks are either “left behind” in an impotent, denuded city or deported — slaves stuck in a foreign land. This was the new context for faith: emotional, political and theological free fall with no discernible bottom. Like our anxiety and despair after 9/11, it affected every part of common life. Israel dared to go deep into that despair; I’m not sure the U.S. ever has. The saving element for ancient Israel is that despair was kept in engaged conversation, which finally produced the antidote to despair, a resilient, surprising hope.

With People Near Despair, The Prophets’ Burden: Buoyant Hope

With the people’s sense of self destroyed along with the temple and city, with people sold into slavery, what is the prophet’s task? Improbably, inexplicably, the words of the prophets are full of hope in a buoyant future, because that’s just how this God IS. At zero hour, when all is lost, we hear phrases like “you will mount up like eagles,” that God’s arm is stretched out and not shortened, that a new history is possible amid the city in shambles, not restrained by the force of empire.

God’s good news is coming, WAIT for it! Prophets of testaments old and new proclaim a new city, new covenant, new temple, almost outside the bounds of human imagining. “A newly nursing mother might forget her baby (unthinkable), before I will forget you,” God says.
A new minority of followers arises, not everybody, but people start to imagine something other than empire. My questions for you: Can you name imperial images today? Can you name images that refuse empire?

Hope comes from the prophets in a torrent of promises. Jesus uses similar language to describe what he sees, what he names the “Reign of God.” All the parables, most of his deeds point to the “Reign of God,” what I define as “where God’s way holds sway.” Only seen by some, only lived by some, but all are welcome. Brueggemann sees that “not unlike the society of ancient Jerusalem after the destruction and displacement, contemporary U.S. society is at the brink of despair.”

Where is your moral compass pointing? What are your social values? Hark will explore faith, morals, ethics and character at the intersection of religion ethics, culture, politics, media, science, education, economics and philosophy. At times this blog will alert readers to breaking news and trends. At times it will attempt to look more deeply into intriguing subjects. Hark means to listen attentively, and we will, as readers talk back to the news.